KLIMT AND THE WOMEN
OF VIENNA’S GOLDEN AGE
KLIMT AND THE
WOMEN OF VIENNA’S
GOLDEN AGE
1 900 –1918
Edited by Tobias G. Natter
Preface by Ronald S. Lauder, foreword by Renée Price
With contributions by
Marian Bisanz-Prakken
Emily Braun
Carl Kraus
Jill Lloyd
Tobias G. Natter
Ernst Ploil
Elisabeth Schmuttermeier
Janis Staggs
PRESTE L
M U N I CH • LON DON • N E W YOR K
Angela Völker
Christian Witt-Dörring
This catalogue has been published in conjunction with the exhibition
KLIMT AND THE WOME N OF VIE NNA’S GOLDE N AGE : 19 0 0 – 1918
Neue Galerie New York
September 22, 2016 – January 16, 2017
Curator
Tobias G. Natter
Director of publications
Scott Gutterman
Managing editor
Janis Staggs
Editorial assistance
Liesbet van Leemput
Book design
Richard Pandiscio,
William Loccisano / Pandiscio Co.
Translation
Steven Lindberg
Project coordination
Anja Besserer
Production
Andrea Cobré
Origination
Schnieber Graphik, Munich
Printing and binding
Passavia, Passau
© 2016 Neue Galerie New York;
Prestel Verlag, Munich • London •
New York; and authors
Prestel Verlag, Munich
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ISBN 978-3-7913-5582-5
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FRONTISPIECE: Gustav Klimt and Friederike
Maria Beer in Weissenbach/Attersee, 1916.
© Imagno/Getty Images, Hulton Archive
Emile Flöge and Gustav Klimt
in a rowboat in Seewalchen/Attersee, 1909.
© Courtesy Asenbaum Photo Archive, Vienna
PAGES 4–5:
Gustav Klimt and Emile Flöge, 1909.
Photograph by Heinrich Boehler. © Imagno/
Getty Images, Hulton Archive
PAGES 8–9:
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Art Installation Design, New York
Anna Barden, New York
Jennifer Belt, New York
Anja Besserer, Munich
Lauren Bierly, New York
Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Vienna
Andrew Bolton, New York
Emily Braun, New York
Antonia Bryan, New York
Lisa Cain, New York
Thomas Campbell, New York
Gigi Chang, Shanghai
Elliot Chiu, Washington, D.C.
Stephane Connery, Bahamas
Andrea Cobré, Munich
Karen Eliot, New York
Han Feng, New York/Shanghai
Karen Ford, New York
Emily Foss, New York
Joyce Fung, New York
Larry Gagosian, New York
Georg Gaugusch, Vienna
Cassandra Gero, New York
Benedetto Gugliotto, Ravenna
Reinhold Heller, Chicago
Max Hollein, San Francisco
Daniela C. Kamiliotis, New York
Suzanne Karsten, Bahamas
Gery Keszler, Vienna
Carl Kraus, Innsbruck
Hansjörg Krug, Vienna
Daniela Kumhala, Vienna
Michael John, Linz
Petra Lamers-Schütze, Vienna/Cologne
Ralph Lauren Corporation, New York
Michael Lesh, New York
The Lewis Collection, Bahamas
Vivienne Lewis, Windermere
Sophie Lillie, Vienna
Steven Lindberg, Berlin
Jill Lloyd, Paris
William Loccisano, New York
Glenn Lowry, New York
Laura Ma, Shanghai
Christoph Mai, Vienna
Maria Grazia Marini, Ravenna
Bethany Matia, New York
Thomas Matyk, Vienna
Brett McCormack, New York
Monika Mayer, Vienna
Tobias G. Natter, Vienna
Vlasta Odell, New York
Richard Pandiscio, New York
Beverly Parsons, New York
Agnes Peresztegi, Paris
Olaf Peters, Halle
Ernst Ploil, Vienna
Inge Prader, Vienna
Ellen Price, New York
Michaela Reichel, St. Gallen
Jerry Rivera, New York
Jennifer Russell, New York
Sarah Scaturro, New York
Elisabeth Schmuttermeier, Vienna
Carl E. Schorske † (1915–2015)
Michael Slade, New York
Janis Staggs, New York
Elizabeth Szancer, New York
Steven Thomas, Los Angeles
Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Vienna
John Vitagliano, New York
Angela Völker, Vienna
Christian Witt-Dörring, Vienna
Nara Wood, Fort Bragg, CA
Tom Zoufaly, New York
We also acknowledge those individuals
who prefer to remain anonymous.
CONTENTS
10 Ronald S. Lauder
Preface
12 Renée Price
Foreword
THE WOMEN
16THE VIE NNESE WOMAN
A Community of Strength
Jill Lloyd
34KLIMT AND SZE RE NA LE DE RE R
Identity and Contradictory Realities of Great Art
Tobias G. Natter
56E MPIRE OF ORNAME NT
K limt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer
Emily Braun
80KLIMT’S STUDIES FOR PORTR AIT
OF ADELE BLOCH - BAUER I
Marian Bisanz-Prakken
96 THE PORTR AIT OF GE RTHA LOE W
Ernst Ploil
102MÄDA PRIMAVESI
Carl Kraus
113PAINTINGS
Texts by Tobias G. Natter
146 DR AWINGS
181CHECKLIST
INTERIOR DECOR ATION
186JOSE F HOFFMANN’S AND KOLOMAN
MOSE R ’S INTE RIOR DECOR ATION
A Larger Framework for Klimt’s Portraits
Christian Witt-Dörring
204 FURNITURE
207CHECKLIST
ORNAMENT
210BEJE WE LE D PORTR AITS
AND PAINTE D JE WE LS
Klimt and Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry
Janis Staggs
240ACCESSORIES FROM
THE WIE NE R WE RKSTÄT TE
Elisabeth Schmuttermeier
250 JE WE LRY AND ACCESSORIES
270CHECKLIST
MODE
274KLIMT, TEX TILES,
AND FASHION
Angela Völker
292KLIMT, FASHION ,
AND POPULAR CULTURE
313CHECKLIST
315 Index
320 Photograph and Copyright Credits
PREFACE
When I was 12 years old, in 1956, I became interested in Art Nouveau. I distinctly remember picking up a book by Maurice
Rheims on the subject. As I paged through it, I came to a full stop when I saw the picture of Gustav Klimt’s iconic painting
The Kiss. To this day, I still don’t understand why this work was considered part of the Art Nouveau school, but I do know this:
I was completely astounded by this painting. It was the first time I had ever seen or even heard of Klimt—remember, I was 12
years old and my guess is that most 12-year-old American boys had not exactly heard of him either.
I can still recall the excitement I felt with the dramatic bend of the head, the multi-colored ground, the colors of the clothing,
and perhaps especially, the woman’s closed eyes. In my 12-year-old mind, still waiting to experience life, this, I thought, was
what a kiss should be—wild, exciting colors, passion, and surrender. Here, in one painting, Klimt was able to capture what
Hollywood was constantly trying to find in the magic of a kiss. I instantly became a fan of Klimt.
About a year later, I was in the E. Weyhe Book Store and Gallery on Lexington Avenue when I picked up my first book on
Klimt. I couldn’t put it down and I felt the same emotions that I had when I first saw The Kiss. A year after that, I saw Klimt’s
paintings for the first time at the Belvedere and other museums in Vienna and, with the help of a friend, I acquired my first
Klimt drawing, along with my first Schiele drawing. That Klimt drawing became one of my prized possessions and I have it
to this day.
Over the next few years, I made an effort to see more of Klimt’s work and I added more drawings to my collection, each one
more thrilling than the next. But it wasn’t until about seven years later, when I was in my early 20s, that I acquired my first
Klimt painting: The Black Feathered Hat.
There was no question that, although I loved Klimt’s landscapes, his paintings of trees, flowers, and water, it was his interpretation of women that captivated me the most. I often go back to that first painting in the Rheims book and see an unusual
understanding of the opposite sex. What came through was the artist’s sensuality, his sensitivity, and his breathtaking imagination. Klimt saw women the way few men were able to see them.
I went back to the Belvedere over and over to see his paintings, never even entertaining the thought that his masterwork,
the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, would someday hang in my museum. For those of you who have seen the film Woman
In Gold with Dame Helen Mirren, you have some understanding of the tortured history of Klimt’s greatest work, the long
fight to retrieve it, first from the Nazis and then from the Austrian government. The film shows the world the great efforts
that Maria Altmann, the niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, had to go through to retrieve something that rightfully belonged to her
family in the first place.
As is well known, when Mrs. Altmann finally won her case after many, many years of struggle, the painting joined the collection of the Neue Galerie. Although several of Klimt’s great paintings still hang at the Belvedere, to me, the portrait of Adele,
which we call the Mona Lisa of the Neue Galerie, is still his most exciting work of all.
Gustav Klimt, The Black Feathered Hat, 1910, oil on canvas. Private Collection
There is no artist that more typifies the golden age of Viennese art than Klimt, and there is no work that captures the beauty
of Viennese women better than the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.
Seeing so many of Klimt’s portraits of women together in this exhibition reminds us of what a great and unique artist he
was. You get an unmistakable feeling and understanding for the world of Vienna 1900, as seen through these very beautiful
paintings and drawings. This is so important because it is a world that was lost.
Klimt is an artist I will always return to. His impact on me remains just as strong nearly six decades after I first encountered
his work. It is a great pleasure and an honor to share Klimt with our visitors through this stunning exhibition.
Ronald S. Lauder
President and Co-Founder, Neue Galerie New York
FOREWORD
Gustav Klimt, whose reputation has reached far beyond his native Europe, is the central artist in the Neue Galerie New York
collection. Our museum is privileged to own the largest group of works by Klimt outside of Austria, ranging from major oil
paintings to outstanding works on paper, from landscapes to portraits, from documents of his private life to an important body
of vintage photographs. The Neue Galerie has often displayed works by Klimt from these rich holdings, most notably in the
landmark 2007 exhibition, “Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections.” That show was a comprehensive overview that brought together a large number of the artist’s major works, and featured a complete reconstruction
of the antechamber of his first studio, designed by his friend, the architect Josef Hoffmann.
Although he accepted public commissions early in his career, Klimt gained his greatest acclaim as a portraitist of Vienna’s
society women. This feat is all the more remarkable because of the artist’s own humble beginnings. With the founding of the
Vienna Secession—Klimt served as its first president—he began to work in a style that imbued his heavily decorated surfaces with a ravishing sensuality. Inspired by the Byzantine mosaics he saw in Ravenna, amongst many other sources, Klimt
created his highly regarded “golden style” paintings, most notably Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the centerpiece of
the Neue Galerie collection.
Klimt’s portraits of women are important for a number of reasons. On an aesthetic level, they represent some of the artist’s
most accomplished and extraordinary paintings, which he elaborated with dozens of preparatory drawings; in the case of the
Adele Bloch-Bauer I portrait, these numbered more than one hundred. Klimt integrated diverse influences to yield a style that
is singular to Vienna 1900. Considered from a social point of view, they create a group portrait of some of the most culturally significant figures of the day, including Adele Bloch-Bauer, Emilie Flöge, Hermine Gallia, Sonja Knips, Szerena Pulitzer
Lederer, her daughter Elisabeth Lederer, Gertha Loew, Fritza Riedler, and Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein. These
invariably fashionable women were formidable characters and role models for the emerging archetype of the New Woman.
The influence of these women, as well as Klimt’s portrayals of them, has continued into the present day. Scores of artists and
designers cite Klimt’s portraits of women as having shaped their own creative output. These include the artist Inge Prader,
the filmmaker Wes Anderson, and the designers Anna Sui, Dolce & Gabbana, L’Wren Scott, Oscar de la Renta, Rick Owens,
Tory Burch, and Valentino. The present catalogue includes a special section detailing the close relationship between Klimt
and the world of contemporary fashion.
In planning this major exhibition, we have joined forces with the premier authority on the subject, curator Tobias G. Natter.
We had the privilege of working with Dr. Natter on our first loan exhibition at the Neue Galerie, in 2002, “Oskar Kokoschka:
Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin, 1909-1914.” The study of Gustav Klimt is a particular interest of his, as manifested in
his very successful exhibition “Klimt und die Frauen” (Klimt’s Women) at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in 2000 and
his authoritative Klimt catalogue raisonné of 2012. Dr. Natter has brought his scholarly acumen and commitment to original
research to this project, and we offer him our most sincere thanks.
Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, ca. 1890-92, oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Douglas Tracy Smith
and Dorothy Potter Smith Fund and The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund
The designers for this catalogue are Richard Pandiscio and Bill Loccisano of Pandiscio Co. We have worked often with
Richard and Bill, and they always show extraordinary creativity in finding exciting ways to present the work at hand. Designer
Han Feng created exquisite models clothed in her interpretation of Vienna 1900 fashion. She brings a keen eye and tremendous joie de vivre to all her projects, and it has been a delight to collaborate with her on this very special project. She worked
closely with paper artist Brett McCormack on the dazzling installation.
Tremendous thanks go to all the lenders to this exhibition, including Leonard A. Lauder; Thomas Campbell of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art; Glenn Lowry of The Museum of Modern Art; Joseph Lewis and the Lewis family of the Lewis Collection;
Michael Lesh of the Serge Sabarsky Collection; Elizabeth Szancer of the Ronald S. Lauder Collection; Maria Grazia Marini
of the Comune di Ravenna; and those private lenders who wish to remain anonymous.
The Neue Galerie staff deserves credit for the planning and execution of this beautiful show, including Scott Gutterman,
Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer; Janis Staggs, Director of Curatorial and Manager of Publications; Allison
Needle, Chief Registrar and Director of Exhibitions; and Michael Voss, Head Preparator.
Finally, our greatest thanks, as always, go to our President and Co-founder, Ronald S. Lauder. His commitment both to
the art of Gustav Klimt and to the mission of the Neue Galerie is unparalleled, and his steadfast support makes all these
endeavors possible.
Renée Price
Director, Neue Galerie New York
Interior view of the Wiener Frauenclub (Vienna Women’s Club), designed by Adolf Loos, 1900. Photograph printed in the journal Das Interessante Blatt, Volume 22, November 1900.
Austrian National Library, Vienna
THE
WOMEN
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
A COMMUNITY OF STRENGTH 1
Jill Lloyd
Gustav Klimt’s brilliant artistic career coincided
with a period of profound cultural, social and
political ferment that witnessed fundamental
changes in the position women occupied in
society. While women in Austria fought for new
social freedoms, the right to education, and
political recognition, they became for many
artists and writers of the period a symbol for
the conflicts and transformations that were
underway as the old world gave way to the new.
In Klimt’s lifetime, women came to be seen
not only as a “Störfaktor der Gesellschaft”2
(disruptive factor in the social order) but also
as “a sign whose meanings implicated much
of modernity itself, that sweeping process of
change which was hard to define but harder to
remain neutral toward.”3
The processes of modernization and women’s
emancipation stretched, of course, far beyond
the boundaries of the Habsburg Empire. The
reason these issues came to the fore with
such intensity in Vienna surely relates to the
clashing social and ethnic factors that turned
the city into a virtual tinderbox threatening at
any minute to ignite. At every turn modernization came up against the “bastion of archaism”4 represented by the Hapsburg monarchy,
with its entrenched hierarchies and traditions.
Simultaneously, the huge population boom
16
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
in Vienna between 1870 and 1910, which
involved arrivals from every corner of the
Empire seeking work and lodgings, resulted
in a highly polarized urban situation, where
rents in the crowded slums on the outskirts of
the city could exceed those demanded on the
fashionable Ringstrasse.5 The extreme contrast between the prosperity of the educated
bourgeoisie and the impoverished, illiterate
proletariat, together with the heterogeneity of
this ethnically mixed population, gave rise less
to a melting pot than a “battlefield of national
chauvinisms, of ethnic and social opposites,
and ultimately, of all kinds of racisms and
of anti-Semitism,” according to Jacques Le
Rider.6 These acute social disparities are clearly evident in the position of women, reflected,
for example, in the statistics regarding women’s employment in the 1890s. An unusually
high percentage of women in Vienna, some 55
percent, were active in various kinds of proletarian work (including factory workers, seamstresses and domestic laborers), as opposed
to 25 percent in the United States and 37
percent in England and Wales. In contrast, the
figures for bourgeois professions (primarily
teaching and a very small number of public
sector jobs, mainly in the postal service) show
that only 12 percent of middle-class women
were employed, in comparison to 19 percent in
the United States and 25 percent in England
and Wales.7 This throws light on the precariously polarized and imbalanced social realities
of Vienna; it also evokes the influence of autocratic Catholic traditions under the Hapsburg
monarchy, which imposed social expectations
of marriage as the be-all and end-all of a
middle-class woman’s existence, despite the
fact that the erosion of the traditional family in
the second half of the nineteenth-century left
many seeking employment outside the home.
The first stirrings of opposition can be found,
not in any mass movement (this was to come
later), but rather in the activities of a very small
number of upper class, mainly Jewish women,
who challenged conventional expectations of
domesticity through their role as salonnières.
The Viennese women’s salon, which had a
longer lifespan than in any other European
city, has its roots in the eighteenth century,
when Fanny von Arnstein [Fig. 1] brought the
liberal enlightenment tradition of Berlin salon
culture to Vienna, where she arrived in 1776
as the bride of Nathan Adam von Arnstein, a
prominent Viennese wholesaler and banker.
Fanny von Arnstein created her salon because
of her desire to play an active role in the social
and cultural life of her adopted city. Although
her primary passion was for music, she also
engaged with the political issues of her day,
using her access to Emperor Joseph II to advocate for the Jews before the Edict of Tolerance
in 1782. Her salon reached its height during
the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, when
it was frequented by international statesmen including the Duke of Wellington and
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, as
well as the Romantic poets and philosophers
Karl Wilhelm and August Wilhelm Schlegel.
According to secret service reports, Fanny von
Arnstein openly voiced her anti-French sentiments and opposition to Napoleon, 8 although
typically for politically engaged women, she
was criticized, specifically for her support of
Prussia, which was thought to throw doubt on
her Austrian patriotism.
1. Vincenz Georg Kininger,
Portrait of Fanny von
Arnstein, 1804, mezzotint
engraving, based upon
a painting by Christophe
Guérin. © Imagno/Getty
Images, Hulton Archive
Although Fanny von Arnstein’s overtly political
stance was exceptional, the continuation of
the salon tradition in Vienna by her daughter,
Henriette Pereira, and in the mid-nineteenth
century by Josephine von Wertheimstein [Fig.
2] and her sister, Sophie Todesco, subverted
the bourgeois expectations and restrictions
imposed on women. By cultivating support
of the arts, giving voice to their own artistic
talents, and bringing together a wide variety
JILL LLOYD
17
2. Josephine von Wertheimstein. Jewish Museum
Vienna, inv. no. 13369
3. Karoline von PerinGradenstein, before 1888.
Photographer: Josef B.
Fechner. Austrian National
Library, Vienna, Pf85 95B1
18
of influential figures, these women created
sheltered, alternative arenas “where interactions that were otherwise unacceptable could
safely occur, while they also pushed the limits
of acceptable roles for women and Jews.” 9 The
Wertheimstein salon in Döbling, and Sophie
Todesco’s salon in the newly built Todesco
Palace on the Kärtnerring, attracted distinguished men from the world of politics and
commerce, as well as scientists, artists and
musicians. While Josephine was praised for
her brilliance as well as her beauty, her daughter Franzi was known as a talented artist.
Alongside literary figures such as Ferdinand
von Saar and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and
musicians including Johannes Brahms, Franz
Liszt, and Johann Strauss, the women cultivated the leading artists of their day, including
Hans Makart, Moritz von Schwind, and Franz
von Lenbach. However, as we shall see, it took
the next generation of salonnières to open
their doors to progressive Secessionist artists
like Gustav Klimt.
Jürgen Habermas contends that European
salons—as theaters of conversation and
exchange—played an important role in the
emergence of what he terms the “public
sphere.” Other historians have argued that
these salons were never part of an oppositional public sphere, and that the polite and agreeable role played by their female hostesses
re-inscribed gender norms linked with patriarchy.10 The women described above necessarily
worked within the framework of their age, but
it would be entirely wrong to think that they
were merely promoting or representing their
husbands’ wealth and position. On the contrary, their salons gave them the opportunity to
play a prominent and influential role that was
denied to them in the “outside” world of the
professions. Directly or indirectly, women used
their salons to exert influence on artistic and
political affairs when doing so by other means
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
was very difficult. Indeed, their salons challenged the very boundaries between public
and private spheres, providing a space of interaction for social groups who were excluded
from more public arenas and a testing ground
for new ideas. The convergence of these various factors, in Alison Rose’s view, made for “a
unique challenge to the status quo.”11
While women in the upper echelons of
Viennese society fought a battle from within,
the events of the 1848 revolution gave rise
to the first public battles for women’s rights.
The Democratic Women’s Union, which was
founded in August 1848 by Baroness Karoline
von Perin [Fig. 3], was the first association to
protest against lower wages for women. Its
activities were cut short when a demonstration
organized by the Union in front of the Viennese
parliament led to a brutal press attack on its
founder, who was defamed as a “dirty Amazon”
and “a political fishwife.”12 In the wake of these
events the Union was dissolved and Von Perin
arrested, declared insane, and deprived of the
right to care for her children. Her husband was
shot for his revolutionary activities and Von
Perin forced into exile. In 1867 these sorry
events were followed by a ban on women
forming political associations. From this point
on the fight for women’s rights developed in
two directions: on the one hand the bourgeois
feminists avoided direct confrontation with the
authorities by devoting themselves to charitable and educational concerns, taking an
essentially conciliatory approach to achieving
their aims and concentrating on issues like the
reform movement in women’s fashion, petitions
to parliament, and organizing women’s clubs
with cultural aims. The working class women’s
groups, on the contrary, led by Adelheid Popp
[Fig. 4], were agitational and combative, organizing protests, demonstrations, and strikes,
and closely aligning themselves with the rise of
the Social Democratic Party [Fig. 5]. Reflecting
the hierarchical social divisions of Vienna more
generally, the women’s movement nevertheless opened lines of communication between
different social spheres through the drive for
girl’s education and the common causes they
held dear. Needless to say, it remained far
easier to slip downwards in society than to
rise. In his fascinating analysis of social mobility, Peter Gay demonstrates how easy it was,
particularly at the lower end of the social scale,
to slide from one level to another, and how
these slippages in social status helped trigger
a more general crisis of identity.13 If a girl lost
her position as a maid, for example, she could
easily to be sucked into the vast underclass
of prostitutes that was officially tolerated in
Vienna. Another option, which was considered
scarcely more respectable at the time, lay in
becoming an artist’s model.
Prostitution was one of the main targets for
reform by feminist groups stemming from liberal bourgeois backgrounds. The misery and
poverty of the women engaged in the sex trade
and the double standards prostitution symbolized in an age when men fully expected their
brides to be virgins, provoked a women’s protest in 1893 that was sparked by the intention
of the local government in Vienna to endorse
licensed brothels. This was one step in the
increasing radicalization of the Austrian feminist movement in the 1890s. Events followed
quickly during these years, when women not
only fought for and finally achieved the right to
grammar school and higher education (entering the Philosophical Faculty at the University
of Vienna for the first time in 1897 and the
Medical Faculty in 1900), but also took up
the banner for women’s suffrage. In 1890 the
first protest for women’s suffrage since 1848
took place when the schoolteacher Auguste
Fickert organized a demonstration to preserve
the limited rights of propertied women to
vote in Vienna. Then in 1893 Fickert founded
the General Austrian Women’s Association
(Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein) to
pursue women’s rights in various fields. From
this point on Rosa Mayreder became Fickert’s
right-hand woman; despite the new politicization of the women’s movement, both of these
leaders continued to emphasize the moral
and cultural development of the individual
rather than women’s collective political goals.
Both Fickert and Mayreder avoided a head-on
confrontation with men, partly because they
needed them to support their cause. Moreover,
in Mayreder’s case, her ideal vision of society
involved surpassing the differences between
the sexes in order to achieve a higher level
of personal, individual culture.14 Nevertheless,
when the granting of universal male suffrage in
1906–07 removed the last significant municipal voting rights for women, feminists finally
petitioned for the repeal of the 1867 law banning them from forming political associations
and launched their campaign for universal
suffrage, which was eventually granted in
1918—the year of Gustav Klimt’s death.
4. Social democratic
women: from left, Therese
Schlesinger (standing),
Adelheid Popp, Anna Posch,
Amalie Seidl, Lotto GlasPhohl, ca. 1905. Imagno/
Austrian Archives
ANTI - F E MINISTS
During the early years of protest, the women’s
movement in Austria was beset by opponents
JILL LLOYD
19
5. Meeting of the constituting National Assembly
in Parliament. Sector with
women members of the
Social Democratic Party
from front left: Adelheid
Popp, Therese Schlesinger,
Anna Boschek, Emmy
Freundlich, Maria Tusch,
and Amalie Seidel, 1919.
Austrian National Library,
Vienna 118.074C
20
on every side. As Harriet Anderson writes in
her history of Austrian feminism: “Although
anti-feminism was by no means a new phenomenon in Austria, it was given an obvious
focus in the last decade of the nineteenth century by the rise of an organized political feminist movement.”15 It seems that anti-feminism
infiltrated every branch of politics and culture,
including philosophy, philology, art, literature
and medicine—indeed a poisonous mix of all
these disciplines characterized anti-feminist
harangues. Science was dragged into the
fray to give dubious corroboration to slanderous attacks on women; the idea that women
were inferior beings, for example, was often
justified by a brand of social Darwinism that
set out to prove how women, children, and
non-Aryan races necessarily occupied a lower
rung on the evolutionary ladder.16 This forged a
crucial and highly characteristic link between
anti-feminism and anti-Semitism in turn-of-thecentury Vienna. Just as anti-Semitic rhetoric
frequently associated Jews with the rise of
capitalism and the breakdown of traditional
social structures, so too women were viewed
as the cause—or at best accomplices—in
the collapse of the existing order.17 Indeed
ideas about the “Judaization” and “feminization” of Viennese culture were frequently
linked. When the dominant culture portrayed
Jews as “feminine, materialistic and sexually
deviant or aggressive,” it used stereotypes that
in many aspects mirrored fin-de-siècle images
of women, “which juxtaposed the ideal of the
virtuous mother with the dangerous, seductive
prostitute.”18
Significantly, it was not only the conservative
forces in Viennese society who raised their
voices against the feminists. Representatives
of what Allan Janik terms “critical modernism,”19 spearheaded by Karl Kraus’s attacks
on hypocrisy in Viennese society, also associated the advances of the women’s movement
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
with cultural decline. Kraus fulminated against
Vienna’s “vaginal society” and accused the
women who gathered to protest against the
state’s toleration of brothels of vicarious sexual
titillation20 (although he also condemned the
co-existence of coyly worded advertisements
for prostitution in the city’s leading newspapers alongside editorials with a high moral
tone).21 While Sigmund Freud acknowledged
that nervousness in women was associated
with excessive sexual repression among the
Victorian middle classes, he also believed that
the psychosexual development of feminists
was arrested, suspecting them of bitter jealousy of men and a failure to overcome penis
envy.22 As Harriet Anderson points out, “all of
these commentators see the feminist movement in terms of a female sexuality which has
in some way transgressed the bounds set by
nature and which is invading the masculine
domain of the intellect.”23
Anti-feminist rhetoric thus thinly masked masculine anxiety about the shifting, porous boundaries of identity between the sexes. In the
workplace men felt threatened by the influx
of women, just as at home they felt their patriarchal authority challenged.24 Fears that the
female sex had transgressed the boundaries of
its gender and imperiled male identity reached
a climax in Otto Weininger’s notorious Sex and
Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) published in 1903 [Fig. 6] and admired by a broad
spectrum of Viennese artists and intellectuals.
Weininger lamented the effeminacy of his times
but also condemned feminist activism, bemoaning the existence of “virilized women” and the
“monstrous increase of fops and homosexuals.”25 He advocated differentiation between
the sexes, whereby “true femininity” would
be antithetical to emancipation and women
would assume their “proper” servile place. In
Weininger’s worldview, women are mothers or
prostitutes, a category that includes any woman
who enjoys sex for its own sake. Contrastingly,
Aryan men possess an autonomous moral self,
characterized by intrinsic genius.
This is not the place to go into detail about
the peculiar twists and turns of Weininger’s
reasoning, which pushes many of the themes
in contemporary cultural discourse to absurd
extremes; his popularity nevertheless underlines
the extent to which he touched a nerve in the
psyche of his times. In his penetrating analysis of Weininger’s book, the medical historian
Chandak Sengoopta acknowledges, “much of
the interest in woman’s nature, including a lot in
Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter, was
a direct response to feminist demands for equality and emancipation.”26 Sengoopta perceptively
sums up cultural discourse about women in turnof-the-century Vienna in the following terms:
“Turn-of-the-century intellectual responses to
modernity were ambivalent at best and hysterical at worst, but the nature and meanings of
femininity (and indeed of gender itself) were at
the very heart of debates about the nature and
future of civilization.”27
F E MINISTS AND MODE RNISTS
Caught in the crossfire of so much anti-feminist propaganda, feminists in turn-of-the century Vienna naturally looked for allies, mostly
among the educated intelligentsia, both male
and female, who joined their associations,
supported them with donations, and offered
lecture courses or premises in which they
could hold their meetings. This was precisely
the sociological group that was also prepared
to embrace the innovations of Secessionist
art, spearheaded by Gustav Klimt. Indeed, the
feminists and Secessionists shared not only
supporters but also detractors, Adolf Loos
viewed the ornamental style represented by
Klimt and Josef Hoffmann as a “feminization”
of modern culture that required urgent reform,
while Kraus launched virulent attacks on both
the Secession and its liberal patrons and clientele, many of whom were of Jewish descent.
Despite these perceived affinities—perhaps
partly because of them—the Vienna Secession
remained closed to women members; women
occasionally exhibited as guests, but the most
significant move they made in the direction
of women artists was their exhibition of “The
Art of Women” (“Die Kunst der Frau”), which
was organized by the Austrian Association
of Women Artists in 1911. Although many
women decorators were members of the
Wiener Werkstätte—a sphere that was more
easily reconciled with their traditional skills
and roles—few women established themselves
as high-profile painters or sculptors. Those
who did, such as Tina Blau and Elena LukschMakowsky, have largely been omitted from
standard art histories of the period.28
Nevertheless, from the bourgeois feminists’
point of view the Secession was perceived
as launching a parallel assault on patriarchal
society and its outmoded values. As we have
seen, the emphasis of the bourgeois women’s
associations until after the turn of the century
was on cultural rather than political emancipation, and in this sense the link with the
artistic Secession was self-evident. Auguste
Fickert went so far as to describe the women’s
movement itself as a “secession,” elaborating
her ideals in an extended architectural metaphor that obviously references modernist
principles of design: “The women’s secession
is not directed against man, it does not want
to rebuild the old edifice which has become
too cramped; it wants to erect a new building—roomy, high, spacious, light, for joint work
between men and women, with rooms commanding an extensive view, with cozy, peaceful
alcoves for shared happiness.”29
6. Cover of the first edition
of Otto Weininger’s
Geschlecht und Charakter
(Sex and Character), 1903
(Vienna/Leipzig: Wilhelm
Braumüller, 1903). Image
from Wikipedia
Fickert’s colleague, Marie Lang, was a passionate admirer of the Secession and main-
JILL LLOYD
21
7. Cover of Dokumente
der Frauen, Vol. 1, No.
4 (May 1899). Edited in
Vienna by Auguste Fickert,
Marie Lang, and Rosa
Mayreder. Collection of
Christian Witt-Dörring,
Vienna
tained contact with many important figures
on the cultural scene, including Klimt, Loos,
Mahler and the theater designer Alfred Roller,
as well as with the influential Hofmannsthal
and Wittgenstein families. Lang regarded
Joseph Olbrich’s Secession building, completed in 1897, as a temple, “in its basic traits
earnest, strict, bare and burdensome like
the tasks we have to cope with.” Indeed she
regarded the Secession movement as a striving for freedom on the part of modern man,
who, like the feminists, “can no longer tolerate
farces and old masquerades.”30 Marie Lang
became a founding editor of Dokumente der
Frauen, a journal that was launched in 1899
as the mouthpiece of the General Austrian
Women’s Association [Fig. 7]. Aimed at middle-class women, it was not a woman’s journal
in the traditional sense but rather a cultural
and political forum with a revolutionary, visionary message that echoed the aspirations
of the Secession. Its first editorial spoke of
“a great movement… sweeping through the
countries of Western civilization. New forces
are emerging from the earth, life is seeking to
take on a new form, and a promising stirring of
minds heralds the coming century.”31
When Marie Lang founded the Viennese
Settlement in 1901 to provide childcare for
working mothers, she commissioned the
Secessionist designers Josef Hoffmann,
Koloman Moser and Alfred Roller to fit out
an old brewery building in the working class
district of the Ottakring to house its activities.
Self-help, harmony, and promotion of the individual’s own strengths and talents, regardless
of class, religion, or nationality, were at the
heart of the Settlement’s philosophy. Typically,
its aim was to “raise” working-class women
to embrace bourgeois values without any real
regard for the economic gulf that separated
them, although the childcare facilities it offered
were indeed revolutionary at the time.
22
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
Another project that was a showcase for modernist design was the Vienna Women’s Club,
opened in 1900 as a social and cultural meeting place for women [Fig. 8]. Loos (who originally worked in the architectural practice of
Rosa Mayreder’s husband, Karl) designed the
interior, and its style was described as combining “functionality and honesty in materials with
colorfulness.”32 A problem was nevertheless
posed by the deep, elegant English gentlemen’s club chairs, which Loos had installed
without considering how genteel women were
supposed to perch on the edge of their seats—
in this case they were more likely to sink into
their “apple purée’” depths.33 Although the
club was once again intended to appeal to all
“ladies” (that is, women with an unspoiled reputation and perfect social manners), regardless
of their class or background, it not surprisingly
attracted mostly prosperous women from the
upper-middle classes.
One prominent member of the Women’s Club
was the journalist Berta Zuckerkandl, who
was also a passionate advocate of Klimt and
the Secession [Fig. 8]. Writing for the Wiener
Allgemeine Zeitung as well as the Secessionist
journal Ver Sacrum and Dokumente der Frauen,
Zuckerkandl played a key role in the cultural
politics of her age. She was sarcastically
dubbed by Kraus as “the puppeteer of the
Viennese cultural scene”; indeed, her network
of influence extended to Paris, where her
sister was married to Paul Clemenceau. 34
Zuckerkandl fostered the international relations of the Secession, introducing, for example, Auguste Rodin to Klimt.35 The very concept for the Secession is thought to have taken
shape in her apartment, which was designed
by Hoffmann and Dagobert Peche and was
home to an influential salon that continued
and renewed the nineteenth-century tradition
of salonnières. Zuckerkandl likewise brought
together leading figures from the worlds of
8. Interior view of the
Wiener Frauenclub
(Vienna Women’s Club),
designed by Adolf Loos,
1900. Photograph
printed in the journal
Das Interessante Blatt,
Volume 22, November
1900. Austrian National
Library, Vienna
science, politics, and the arts: Peter Altenberg,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hoffmann, Klimt,
Mahler, Otto Wagner and Stefan Zweig were
all habitués, alongside medical scientists like
the psychiatrists Richard Krafft-Ebing and
Julius Wagner von Jauregg, and the surgeon
Theodor Billroth. Contact with the world of science and medicine was forged by Berta’s husband Emil Zuckerkandl, a renowned professor
of anatomy at the University of Vienna, and her
brother-in-law Victor Zuckerkandl, owner of the
Purkersdorf Sanatorium, which was designed
on Berta’s recommendation by Hoffmann and
decorated by the Wiener Werkstätte. Berta
and Emil Zuckerkandl merit special attention
because they are a prime example of a male/
female alliance that lent its support both to the
women’s movement and the Secession, using
public forums to express their progressive
views. Emil Zuckerkandl led the opposition
within the University of Vienna when Klimt
was accused of obscene depictions of female
nudity in his Faculty Paintings, while Berta
defended the artist no less vociferously in her
newspaper column. Both of the Zuckerkandls
also supported women’s right to higher education.36 Berta believed that only an improvement
in women’s education would encourage them
to take an interest in public affairs, and in her
memoirs she proudly recalled her husband’s
support for women’s entry to the medical
school, claiming he was the first to choose
women medical assistants once they were
finally admitted to the university in 1900.37
Progressive artists and designers took part,
alongside the Zuckerkandls, in various pedagogical projects initiated by the women’s
movement. In the same year as the Secession
opened its doors to the public, the Art School
Association for Women and Girls (Verein
Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen) was
co-founded by Rosa Mayreder, who was not
only a talented author but also the first woman
member of the Vienna Club of Watercolor
Artists. This school offered the first opportunity in Vienna for women to be trained as professional artists and commercial designers.38
JILL LLOYD
9. Berta Zuckerkandl, 1908.
Photograph by Atelier
d’Ora (Dora Kallmus, Arthur
Benda). Austrian National
Library, Vienna
23
The school shared the Secession’s aim to
break down the boundaries between the fine
and decorative arts, and to this end it established courses in applied arts and engraving.
Some of its pupils went on to design for the
Wiener Werkstätte, while others were among
Koloman Moser’s most successful students at
the Viennese School of Applied Arts. Alongside
traditional skills like embroidery, a chiseling
course was taught by Georg Klimt (Gustav’s
brother); woodcutting and calligraphy were
also on offer. Although once again this initiative
appealed mainly to women from the educated middle classes, it was subsidized by the
Ministry of Education after 1908, which made
it possible for the school to offer free and supported places. Indeed, the school continued to
thrive even after 1920 when Vienna’s Academy
of Fine Art at last opened its doors to a limited
number of women.39
One of the most ambitious and high-profile
educational projects for women was launched
in 1901 by Eugenie Schwarzwald, a Jewish
intellectual and visionary educator who had
graduated from Zurich University with a doctorate in German literature [Fig. 10]. Like Berta
Zuckerkandl, Schwarzwald counted among
her friends leading figures of Austrian art,
literature, and music, including Elias Canetti,
Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Adolf Loos,
Oskar Kokoschka, and Arnold Schoenberg—
all of whom either taught for her school or
attended her famous “outsider’s salon,” which
she ran after 1909 as an open house in the
apartment Loos had designed for her. The
Schwarzwald’sche School, mainly attended
by girls from rich assimilated Jewish families,
began as a lycée for girls and was extended
in 1902 so that her pupils could sit for the
Matura examination and enter university. The
following year she added the first co-educational junior school to exist in Vienna. An equal
weight was given to science and modern and
24
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
classical languages and, in her own words,
Schwarzwald’s aim was to provide a “creative
education,”40 liberating the artist she believed
resided in every child and activating its powers of thinking and feeling. Influenced by the
writings of Rosa Mayreder and Marie Lang,
Schwarzwald placed a great emphasis on the
“naturalness” of the girls’ education, emphasizing the dangers of city life for body and soul
and eventually planning a new countryside
school in Semmering that was to be designed
by Loos. The idea was to offer a curriculum
including physical exercise and observation
of nature in order to achieve “the harmonious
development of all talents and strengths.”41
Significantly, many leading feminists placed a
special emphasis on women’s “natural” role as
mothers. Marianne Hainisch, a leading figure in
the League of Austrian Women’s Associations
(Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine), strongly encouraged women to preserve the qualities
of “devotion, self-sacrifice and humility” which
she associated with “the eternal feminine,”
and which marked out women, in her opinion, as morally superior creatures. Inspired by
Hainisch’s visionary feminism, Schwarzwald
believed that “it would be the highest task of
culture to reunite humanity and nature, to find
the way back to the primal mother.”42
One of the most remarkable aspects of
Schwarzwald’s school was the number of progressive artists she attracted to her teaching
staff. Arnold Schoenberg taught free seminars
in the afternoons on harmony and counterpoint, and other musicians she involved included Alexander Zemlinsky, Elsa Bienenfeld, and
Egon Wellesz. Kokoschka took part as an
art teacher until he was forced to give up his
post in 1913 because of a lack of suitability
to teaching. Loos also played an important
role, holding private architecture classes in
the premises of the school from 1912–13
and teaching art history as one of the fur-
ther education classes the establishment also
offered. Loos became an important ideological
influence on the Semmering project, as he
encouraged Schwarzwald in her fight against
unnaturalness, hypocrisy, excess, and lack of
authenticity. In line with Loos’ attack on ornamentation in his polemical essay, “Ornament
and Crime” (“Ornament und Verbrechen,”
1908), Schwarzwald encouraged her girls to
wear simple, practical clothing, to abandon
jewelry and corsets, and to develop their personalities through “health, uprightness, and
strength of character.”43 In the school’s annual
report for 1913, Loos published an essay relating to his work at Semmering (which was eventually curtailed by the outbreak of World War I),
entitled “Rules for Building in the Mountains.”
Here he passionately enjoined architecture to
truth, emphasizing the need for honesty and
simplicity. Although Loos is often associated
with the virulently anti-feminist writings of
Otto Weininger, and known for his attacks on
what he termed “feminine” ornamentation, he
nevertheless sympathized with the feminists’
demands for a return to natural principles.
The women’s movement straddled what we
would now think of as two generations of
Viennese modernism, beginning with the ornamental Secession and continuing with the fundamentalist approach of Loos, Kokoschka, and
Schiele, all of whom aspired to strip away outward appearances in order to reveal underlying
truths. What makes the situation complicated,
looking back from the perspective of today, is
that feminists, modernists of both generations,
and anti-feminists alike all perceived the need
for a moral reform of society. True enough, their
means to this end differed, but there are areas
where aspects of their ideas overlap, for example in the association of women with motherhood and nature, and their attacks on the failings of modern civilization. But while Weininger
associated women with cultural decline and
feared the invasion of the masculine principle by feminine sexuality, Rosa Mayreder and
Marianne Hainisch believed that the male temper of the times, with its emphasis on intellect
and egoism, should be counterbalanced by the
cultivation of feminine qualities and virtues.
Like many feminists of the period, they associated women with nature, a life force they often
linked with motherhood, that was capable not
only of regenerating a tired and decadent civilization but also of cutting through the double
standards and “wretched hypocrisy” of modern
society—a society that maintained one set of
rules for men and another for women. This
reforming spirit struck a chord with the modernists, and Hermann Bahr (editor of Ver Sacrum
and spokesman for the early ideals of the
Secession) consequently affirmed that men’s
support for women’s suffrage was motivated
“not so much out of liking for women… but for
the sake of politics…because they hope that
with women a new moral element will force its
way into politics, an element which it needs in
order to be up to the great tasks of the times.”44
The feminists’ attacks on social hypocrisy also
forged a link with Janik’s critical modernists;
it was the basis of their common ground with
reformers like Kraus and Loos—even though
these men expressed on occasion hostile
anti-feminist views.
10. Eugenie Schwarzwald,
1924–25. Photograph
by Trude Fleischmann.
© Imagno/Getty Images,
Hulton Archive
KLIMT’S WOME N
Klimt’s exclusive preoccupation with the subject of women after 1900, and his contact with
a wide spectrum of Viennese women, ranging
from the upper-class women he portrayed to the
working-class models for his nude drawings,
all link him inextricably with the Frauenfrage
that preoccupied his age. Significantly, Klimt’s
most important and enduring relationship was
with Emilie Flöge, a talented dress designer
and successful businesswoman who was the
artist’s lifetime companion and confidante.
Together with her two sisters, Emilie Flöge
JILL LLOYD
25
opened an exclusive couture house in 1904,
Schwestern Flöge, with interior designs by
Hoffmann and Moser, which was located in
the heart of Vienna’s fashion district, on the
first floor of the Casa Piccola in Mariahilferstrasse. As Janis Staggs points out, this was
“a unique enterprise for the period, offering
the latest French and English fashions as well
as Reformkleider and their own designs…
because of their close ties with Klimt, they had
a potential client list before they opened their
doors.”45 Emilie Flöge visited London and Paris
each year to research the latest fashion trends
and maintained her own impressive household.
She also enjoyed a longstanding relationship
with Klimt outside the conventional bonds of
marriage, which many feminists of the period
would have considered an ideal arrangement—
almost all of them condemned marriage as a
hypocritical social restraint that gave the man
unjust rights over his spouse and prohibited a
free and equal exchange of affection. Although
Emilie is often presented as a victim of Klimt’s
serial philandering with his studio models and
others, she would have been well aware that
marriage would have compromised her profession; indeed most married women were forced
to renounce their working lives outside the
home. Surviving photographs of Emilie Flöge
show her as a tall, proud, and beautiful woman,
often modeling her own fashion designs. She
appears in a similar light in Klimt’s 1902–03
portrait, wearing a dress with a high bodice
that falls loosely at the waist, with sleeves billowing at the elbows, both features of reform
fashion that allowed women a new freedom of
movement [Fig. 11].
Klimt and Emilie Flöge shared a passion for
textiles, fashion, and jewelry. They both assembled collections of European and Oriental
embroidered textiles, and their mutual interest in Far Eastern art and design exerted an
influence on both Flöge’s dress designs and
26
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
Klimt’s paintings. In an early color photograph
taken in the summer of 1910 on one of their
summer trips to Attersee, Flöge appears in
a sumptuous Chinese robe that was probably from Klimt’s collection [See page 285].
Another photograph [Fig. 12] pictures Klimt
and Flöge together in the garden of the Villa
Oleander wearing loose-fitting caftans—with
Flöge noticeably towering over Klimt. Caftans
were an element of men’s fashion reform and
were not altogether unknown in progressive
artistic circles: Klimt, Hermann Bahr and the
sculptor Anton Hanak were all known to favor
this comfortable garb. However, given the
current discussion about the “feminization” of
Viennese culture among the anti-feminists and
the attempts by the feminists themselves to
promote the “natural” feminine principle as a
means of reforming civilization, this photograph
is particularly interesting for its lack of sexual
differentiation. True enough, Flöge’s caftan is
flowered and Klimt’s plain, and he sports his
customary beard, but there is nevertheless a
sexual equality or ambivalence in their casual
dress that relates to the shifting boundaries of
identity between the male and female sexes.
How, we might ask, if at all, did Klimt’s relationship with this strong, independent woman
impact more generally on his representations of
the female sex? In terms of the feminist versus
antifeminist debates, it has often been pointed
out that if Klimt had his “Midi” (his affectionate
nickname for Emilie), he also had his “Mizzi”—the
artist’s model Maria Zimmerman, who mothered
two of the artist’s illegitimate sons and was just
one of his many conquests. There is evidence
that Klimt had an alternative set of rules for
this second liaison: Maria received short shrift
when she disturbed a summer sojourn with
Flöge on the Attersee, and Klimt brushed aside
her artistic ambitions.46 In his life Klimt clearly
divided women into those he respected, even
exalted, and those he slept with—although the
boundary between the two was not absolutely
fixed—in a manner highly characteristic of the
double moral standards of his age.47
allegorical paintings, not to mention the numerous erotic drawings that flowed from his pen.
While this may well relate to a personal obsession, it also seems likely that Klimt viewed the
subject of women as a key to the modernity of
his art. Chandak Sengoopta’s observation that
women in turn-of-the-century Vienna served
“not merely as an uncomplicated symbols
of femininity but as a sign whose meanings
implicated much of modernity itself” is highly
relevant to Klimt, who only began to concentrate exclusively on female subjects after he
was appointed first president of the Vienna
Secession in 1897. Indeed, Berta Zuckerkandl,
in her enthusiastic reviews of Klimt’s work,
often praised his ability “to paint the woman
of his time.”48 More generally Klimt’s images of
women are acknowledged as complex representations with a symbolic force; as such they
embody allusions to the “women question” that
are far from straightforward to read.
However, it is not necessarily correct to
assume that double standards in Klimt’s life
were directly and unproblematically reflected
in his art. Alongside his remarkable female
portraits, women also became the focus of his
After the scandal provoked by the University
Faculty Paintings that resonated from 1900
to 1905, Klimt made the decision to assert his
independence from state patronage, breaking
with the patriarchal forces that had directed his
11. Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Emilie Flöge, 1902–03
(with later reworkings), oil on canvas. Wien Museum, Vienna
JILL LLOYD
12. Emilie Flöge and
Gustav Klimt in the garden
of the Villa Oleander in
Kammerl/Attersee, 1910.
Private Collection
27
early career, just as he broke, in the paintings
themselves, with a stable, hierarchical worldview. From this time onwards Klimt was reliant
for his continuing success on private portrait
commissions of wealthy, cultivated women,
most of whom were Jewish by descent. It
was usually their husbands or fathers (including some of the wealthiest and most powerful businessmen and industrialists in the
Hapsburg Empire) who commissioned the portraits, but it was the women who cultivated
the relationship with Klimt; some of whom,
like Szerena Lederer and Eugenia Primavesi,
assembled extensive collections of his work.
As Tobias G. Natter points out, “that Klimt’s
women could have their portraits painted by
one of the most expensive painters in Europe
but were not allowed to vote is all too often
overlooked today.”49
Nevertheless, in the established Viennese tradition of the salon hostess, these women wielded considerable power in the social sphere. Not
only the wealthy heiresses like Adele BlochBauer—who were entitled to own the contents
of their residences while their husbands owned
the structures—but also less socially elevated
women in Klimt’s circle, like Berta Zuckerkandl,
played an influential role through their salons.
When we delve a little deeper into the lives of
“Klimt’s women,” we find that a striking number
of them achieved remarkable professional success given the limited opportunities available
to them at the time. Emilie Flöge and Berta
Zuckerkandl (whom he never portrayed) are
outstanding examples, but there are others:
Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann (whom Alma
Mahler claims had an affair with Klimt50) was a
renowned woman mountaineer; Gertha Loew
became the principal shareholder and chairwoman of her father’s sanatorium, where Klimt
was taken after his fatal stroke in 1918; Marie
Henneberg was a teacher before her marriage,
and Hermine Gallia became a partner in the
28
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
Wiener Werkstätte when it was restructured in
1914, and a founder of the Austrian Werkbund.
Adele Bloch-Bauer, meanwhile, supported various organizations advocating social reform
and women’s suffrage.51 Several women who
were portrayed by Klimt had ambitions as
artists, which he apparently encouraged. Klimt
gave Szerena Lederer drawing instruction
for many years and actively encouraged her
daughter Elisabeth Lederer to train as a sculptress at the School of Arts and Crafts, which
led to a public career in the 1930s. Eugenia
Primavesi had to give up her career as an
actress when she married her banker husband,
but she retained her stage name “Mäda” and
her love of the theater. After 1914, when the
Primavesi family took over the financing of the
Wiener Werkstätte, Eugenia was a member
of the supervisory board and sole owner after
1925, before both the Primavesi fortune and
the Wiener Werkstätte crashed at the end of
the decade.52
The lives of these women, even briefly surveyed, give a fascinating insight into changing
gender roles in the upper reaches of Viennese
society. But how, if at all, is this reflected in Klimt’s portraits? In the “Kunstschau”
exhibition of 1908 Klimt made something of
a programmatic statement about his female
portraits by presenting a core group—Adele
Bloch-Bauer, Fritza Riedler and Margaret
Stonborough-Wittgenstein [See page 188]—in
a room that summarized his achievement to
date. In these three portraits Klimt used ornamental decoration that he partly derived from
royal portraiture—the stylized hairstyle of the
Infanta portrayed by Velàzquez is often cited
as a source for the geometrical shapes behind
Fritza Riedler’s and Margaret StonboroughWittgenstein’s heads,53 while the shimmering
gold leaf patterning in Adele Bloch-Bauer I
[See page 129] was inspired by the Byzantine
mosaic of Empress Theodora in Ravenna’s San
Vitale [Fig. 13].54 By painting women from the
haute bourgeoisie in a royal style, Klimt subtly
flattered their social aspirations—and those of
their husbands and fathers—literally ennobling
them and, as the contemporary critic Josef
Anton Lux notes, fulfilling their “great longing
to rise above the ordinary, everyday world, like
princesses and Madonnas, in a beauty that
can never be ravaged and devastated by the
clutching hands of life.”55
The geometric ornamentation that encases
these women and reaches a climax in Adele
Bloch-Bauer’s iridescent body armor can be
interpreted as a restriction the artist imposes on his models, which directly contradicts
the emancipatory ideals of fashion reform.56
However, it may well be that the layers of reality
and illusion in these examples of Klimt’s finest
female portraits refer in a more general way
to current discussions about the multiple layers of female identity and social ambition. In
a way Klimt’s portraits acknowledge that the
social expectations and conventions “encasing”
women were at odds with their desire to break
the mold and assert their individual identity. The
coexistence of Klimt’s formal, hierarchical style
for the clothes and surroundings with his highly
naturalistic treatment of the faces and hands
involves above all a play between surface and
structure, between artifice and nature—categories that frequently recur in discussions about
women’s role in the changing kaleidoscope of
modern life. In her fascinating essay concerning the sources of Klimt’s decorative imagery
in evolutionary biology, Emily Braun points
out that there is a noticeable progression in
Klimt’s depictions of women, from their association with the biological impulses of nature
(for example, in his water nymph paintings) to
an association with decorative symbols drawn
from early cultures like Mesopotamia, Egypt,
pre-classical Greece, and Byzantium—including the Egyptian “all-seeing eye” in Adele
Bloch-Bauer’s gown. “The ornamental accompaniment of the portraits,” Braun writes, “does
more than adorn these women; it represents a
larger history of ideas concerning the genealogy of decorative and symbolic form.”57 Braun
connects this development to Klimt’s fascination with theories of evolution, which he drew
not from the social Darwinism that featured
in contemporary anti-feminist literature, but
rather from the enlightened discourse in Berta
Zuckerkandl’s socially progressive salon, where
he came across the leading medical minds of
his day.58 These references in Klimt’s symbolic
ornamentation may also relate to feminist ideas
about reforming modern civilization. As we have
seen, Rosa Mayreder and others believed that
women’s deep connection with nature provided
a vital force capable of cultural regeneration.
It is surely not by chance that Klimt associates symbols from the early cultures he most
admired with the educated, progressive women
he portrayed, thus acknowledging their vital
role in regenerating the culture of their times—
not least as supporters and defenders of his art.
The theme of biological and cultural regeneration runs through many of Klimt’s allegorical
paintings of women, often set in opposition
to the contrary forces of darkness and death.
In Hope I [Fig.14] and Hope II, for example,
Klimt breaks the taboo of depicting pregnant nudes, who are nevertheless haunted
by spectral skulls that lurk in the surrounding
space. Although Klimt is not typically presented as an artist interested in the social
issues of his day, mother and child mortality
ran high in turn-of-the-century Vienna, particularly among the disadvantaged lower classes
(although class was not the only determining
factor; Adele Bloch-Bauer, for example, lost
two babies before 1905, and shortly before
painting Hope I Klimt witnessed the death of
his own son, Maria Zimmerman’s baby, Otto).
Although Klimt’s allegorical style transposes
JILL LLOYD
13. Copy of the mosaic of
the Empress Theodora from
the Basilica of San Vitale,
Ravenna, mid-6th century.
Execution: Gruppo Mosaicisti
dell’Accademia di Belle Arti
di Ravenna, 1951, glass,
enamel, wood, metal. Ufficio
Turismo e Attività Culturali.
Comune di Ravenna
29
current social issues into a philosophical realm
that symbolizes the universal cycle of life and
death, there is nevertheless a play between
contemporary and universal allusions that is
a potent aspect of Klimt’s modernity. Klimt’s
allegorical women, moreover, are frequently
seductive; even a young woman in the full
bloom of pregnancy like Hope I has a seductive allure. Whereas the anti-feminists associated women with traditional, saintly ideas
of motherhood that were radically opposed
to the threatening sexuality of the prostitute
or femme fatale, Klimt combines elements of
both stereotypes to achieve more complex,
ambivalent representations. Even when he
comes close to more typical fin-de-siècle
images of the femme fatale, for example in his
Judith paintings, Klimt significantly chooses a
story associated with a biblical heroine who
murders Holofernes to save her people from
the Assyrians, rather than the misogynist story
of Salome, who dances so seductively in front
of her stepfather that he presents her with
John the Baptist’s head on a plate.59
14. Gustav Klimt, Hope I,
1903–04, oil on canvas.
National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa
30
In two of Klimt’s late allegorical paintings, The
Virgin (1913) and The Bride (1917–18) [Fig.
15], the artist raised issues that were of central importance to the “women question.” The
double morality that required women to remain
chaste while young men were encouraged
to pursue amorous adventures indeed provoked passionate protest among the feminists.
Anti-feminists, meanwhile, perceived women’s
sexuality as a threatening force; Weininger, we
recall, condemned all women who enjoyed sex
as prostitutes. Klimt was certainly under no
obligation to take sides in this heated debate,
but his treatment of the subject is nevertheless far removed from Weininger’s invective.
The Virgin in Klimt’s painting is an innocent,
dreaming girl surrounded by sensuous nudes
who appear to embody her fantasies, thus
acknowledging a fracture between women’s
THE VIENNESE WOMAN
socially acceptable roles and her inner drives.
In The Bride, Klimt introduces a male protagonist caught in a web of encircling nudes, while
the innocent bride rests her head trustingly
on his shoulder. On the right side of the painting, which remained unfinished at the time of
Klimt’s death, the bride is transformed into
a sensual nude, spreading her legs so that
her sex is half-visible through a decorative
veil. Locating a hidden skull in this side of
the painting, Marian Bisanz-Prakken interprets
this composition as a meditation on the deadly
consequences of venereal disease: the first
sexual act “brings with it the risk of infection…
to which the man has been exposed through
his previously unbridled sexual life.”60 Be this
as it may, Klimt once again comments on the
multiple identities of women and the difference
between social expectations and sexual drives.
By so doing, he formulates an allegory that is
wholly pertinent to his times and raises unresolved issues about the sexual predicament of
both men and women.
Klimt is frequently accused of visualizing
women merely as objects of male desire,
particularly in the numerous erotic drawings
of his studio models, who are shown dreamily
pleasuring themselves, apparently unaware
of the male artist observing them yet unconsciously playing out his fantasies before our
eyes. These drawings of “autonomous” sexuality, which so ambivalently draw together the
threads of male and female desire, provoked
charges of obscenity when they were first
exhibited in Vienna—not surprisingly in an age
when female sexuality was perceived as a
threat, masturbation was treated as an illness,
and clitoridectomy was not unknown.61 Klimt
did not endorse Rosa Mayreder’s aspiration
that women should “perceive and experience
the self as an active, self-determining subject, not solely as the passive object of male
desire.”62 Nor was he a “feminist” in the sense
that he neither illustrated feminist books nor
openly supported women’s political emancipation. However, the fact that feminist sympathizers and progressive thinkers like Berta
Zuckerkandl and Marie Lang so wholeheartedly approved of Klimt’s art may well relate to his
ability to visualize some of the dilemmas that
beset women in the modern age. Moreover,
his allegories embody a belief in the regenerative force of the female sex—an idea that
was current in the feminist sphere, and quite
foreign to anti-feminists like Weininger, who
associated women with cultural degeneration
and decline. Klimt brought his controversial
representations of female sexuality into the
public domain, and in his layered portraits of
women he not only ennobled the female sex
but also acknowledged a fracture between
social expectations and individual identity—a
fracture that would eventually widen into a
chasm separating women in the nineteenth
century from their twentieth-century heirs.
1
This essay is a revised version
of “Feminists and Femme Fatales:
Representing Women in Turn-ofthe-Century Vienna,” originally
published in Vienna 1900, Style and
Identity (Munich: Prestel Verlag in
association with Neue Galerie
New York, 2011), 121 ff.
2
Alfred Weidinger, “Gustav Klimt—
Machismo and Nervous Heroines:
Thoughts on the Image of Women,”
edited by Agnes Husslein-Arco,
Jane Kallir and Alfred Weidinger,
The Women of Klimt, Schiele, and
Kokoschka (Vienna: Belvedere,
2015), 213.
3
Chandak Sengoopta, Otto
Weininger, Sex, Science and
Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago
and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 5.
15. Gustav Klimt, The Bride, 1917–18 (unfinished), oil on canvas.
Private Collection, on loan to the Belvedere, Vienna
4
Luisa Viaja, “On the Women’s
Question in Vienna around 1900:
Gender Asymmetries, Emancipation
Efforts, and Uprisings,” in The
Women of Klimt, Schiele and
Kokoschka, op. cit., footnote 2, 10.
5
Ibid., 11.
6
Ibid., 12.
7
Lily Braun, Die Frauenfrage: ihre
geschichtliche Entwicklung und
wirtschaftliche Seite (Leipzig, 1901),
220, 153. Quoted in Ziaja, op. cit.,
footnote 4, 9.
8
Alison Rose, “The Jewish
Salons of Vienna,” in Gender and
Modernity in Central Europe:
The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
and its Legacy, edited by Agatha
Schwartz (University of Ottawa
Press, 2010), 123.
9
Ibid., 121.
10
See Jürgen Habermas, The
Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1991), and
Daniel Harkett’s review of The Power
of Conversation: Jewish Women and
Their Salons, The Jewish Museum
New York, and the accompanying
catalogue edited by Emily D. Bilski
and Emily Braun (Yale University
Press: New Haven, 2005), in
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide:
A Journal of Nineteenth-Century
Visual Culture, e-journal published
by AHNCA, vol. 4, issue 3,
Autumn 2005.
11
Rose, op. cit., footnote 8, 120.
12
“schmutzige Amazone” and
“politische Marktschreierin.”
See entry on Karoline von Perin
JILL LLOYD
31
UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE
Tobias G. Natter
Klimt and the Women of Vienna´s Golden Age,
1900-1918
Gebundenes Buch, Leinen mit Schutzumschlag, 320 Seiten,
23,5 x 28,5 cm
229 farbige Abbildungen, 97 s/w Abbildungen
ISBN: 978-3-7913-5582-5
Prestel
Erscheinungstermin: Oktober 2016
Berühmte Frauenporträts in einem Band
Klimt spielte im Wien der Jahrhundertwende eine zentrale Rolle. In seinen Arbeiten wird die
Wende vom Symbolismus bis zur Moderne erfahrbar. Zu seinen berühmtesten Arbeiten gehören
seine sinnlichen Frauenporträts.
Glanzpunkte der Publikation sind Klimts Porträts von Damen der Wiener Gesellschaft: Serena
Lederer (1899), Gertrud Loew (1902), Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Mäda Primavesi (1913),
Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) und Ria Munk III (1917). Diese Arbeiten zeigen, wie sich Klimts
Porträtierstil von seinen frühen ätherischen, vom Symbolismus und den Präraffaeliten geprägten
Bildern bis zu seiner „Goldenen Phase“ sowie seinen fast fauvistischen Darstellungen entwickelt.
Ergänzt werden diese Werke von vorbereitenden Skizzen und Arbeiten Klimts für die Wiener
Werkstätte.